Covenants should be a topic brought up as we move into the coming patches. This is a topic of the performance of sinful brand in relation to the hunt spell so let’s lay out some context surrounding them. I would first like to talk PVE and then shift to pvp.
While kyrian was the clear outlier for vengeance since the dawn of the expansion, many dh’s were led to believe venthyr was the same for havoc. This is very much not the case. Due to last minute nerfs to venthyr and buffs/rework to the hunt, sinful brand has immensely fallen out of flavor. From data at warcraft logs we can see venthyr trails behind night fae in almost every single situation(the exception being sludgefist which has 1 min burst profiles for the fight.) This is also true in mythic plus where venthyr lags behind night fae significantly.
PVE:
While venthyr might SIM well, which is what many sites pre expansion would make their tier lists off of, it does not perform well next to the hunt. The hunt is INCREDIBLY easy to use and fit into normal play. It does huge upfront single target and leaves a sizable dot on 5 mobs which is about 66% of the strength of the sinful brand. Sinful brand use cant compete with this at all when simply talking about the single target dot even if the cd is 1 min vs 1.5.
In order to make sinful brand do well you need to make incredibly good use of the meta application on a 4 minute cool down. This means you have to choose between where is best to use meta for the 30 seconds of demon form or best to use meta for the dot application. Compared to a simple 1.5 min cd that just does great damage to both a boss and a trash pack(because of the huge dot that hits 5 targets) sinful brand requires immensely good set ups to even come close. The likely hood of most players to find the situation where sinful will out do the easy to use hunt is close to 0. Where sinful brand shines is when you pull a silly amount of mobs in a dungeon and you meta on top of them. Honestly it would be better to just cap the targets hit by the dot on meta and just up the damage since hitting the amount of targets required to out do the hunt’s 3 uses in the amount of time would be very difficult.
PVP:
The situation in pvp is even worse than pvp. Not only does night fae have VASTLY better soulbinds and soulshape but burst damage is incredibly important in pvp. I would honest go so far as to say night fae’s Hunt is the only reason dh is actually playable in pvp at a high level. The hunt provides immense 1 hit burst AND gives you a 25% leech buff against the target, something that was ripped away from dh before shadowlands.
Sinful brand on the other hand gives you a large dot, the damage is good but unfortunately it can easily be dispelled and even if it isnt dispelled since it isnt instant damage like the hunt, it can be healed through quite easily. If you look at pvp representation you can see it is abysmal but you can also see that all of them are night fae if above even 2k cr.
Other than aesthetic, which I think venthyr is awesome for, I could never recommend any demon hunter player to EVER go venthyr, there is 0 reason when kyrian is so busted for vengeance and night fae is not only more fun but also better in almost every scenario conceivable for havoc.
TLDR: Sinful brand is balanced around the meta application but tuned too low compared to the hunt while being much harder to use effectively. It performs incredibly poorly compared to night fae in all recorded locations, and is even worse in pvp than pve comparatively.