For what it's worth, I mained an Ice/Empathy controller back in the day and was one of the most sought after teammates on my server. The catch is that while my heals and empathy buffs were nice, they were often unneeded. It was my crowd control with ice powers that made that character shine.
Specifically, by slotting a chance to confuse into arctic air, I could stand in the middle of a giant mob with AA on and the enemies would be super slowed while attacking each other. Add glacier, blizzard (ice storm? been a while) jack frost and the rest of the team nuking, and you basically make mobs a joke that you can more or less tank yourself with AA (I dunno if chance to confuse io's are a thing anymore but that specifically is what made my ice controller a god).
So, empathy was a nice bonus but hardly the selling point of that hero.