Wow! Thank you so much for your comments! I'm so glad that you enjoyed our work and took the time to let us know. Sincerely, your post made our day.
As to why the overlap in abilities: in EtR, Vampires could heal by spending 3 blood, and we felt there needed to be some way to get rid of damage. Ideally, we wanted the characters to help each other out, but there needed to be some way to administer self-healing. The fire axe was due to the fact that in the first iteration of the game, we hadn't fully conceptualized what magical firefighting would look like in a fantasy world and had concepts like making firebreaks with an axe rather than using water elementals. That's part of the reason why all the characters carry fire axes. We felt we needed a "uniform" for the characters to be a fire company, while still keeping them stylistically and mechanically different. That's the thought process about the overlaps, anyway.
Again, thank you so much for your comments!