Soth Sword is large damage, roughly the same as wielding two weapons. With wardance or frenzy, this damage is doubled, and so the character with no gear and just a good weapon is doing roughly the same damage as 2 people, some of the time. I think that this was almost true with most other two handers, with the factor being between 1.5 and 2 times as much damage as a regular person without gear.
Now if someone is wearing +5 damage and gets some additional damage from strength and ranks so their total damage is +10, let's say, a typical person with normal weapons would get roughly the equivalent of 2 more weapons as a result of these bonuses, but they'd had to do some work to do this. A person with the same gear, strength, ranks but using a two hander receives the same bonuses, some of the time, and ends up with a rough equivalent of 5 weapons instead of the 4 weapons the non-barbarian, non-shaman person has.
Seems like if you reduce the damage of two-handers slightly, then the playing field for damage between barbarians and shamans and the other classes is a bit more balanced, even with gear included? There's nothing stopping a barbarian from dual wielding, so it's really only shamans that get the biggest hit here.
