The Tavern

I have never played VS and also want to try new Summoning spells but I don't have much time for crawl. Is VSSu a good combo? Or does Guardian spirit and Regen 3 work much better for primarily melee character?

I've been playing with VS monks for the past day or two and they can be squishy. Mine keep getting murdered because I can't use any healing devices. Summons would help mitigate that while I ran away to regenerate. You know how I feel about summoners, though. Challenge class + challenge race = hard game. Let us know how your experience pans out.

VS anything is a good combo; VS is like a troll that has good aptitudes, full slots, and can recharge magic while fighting. Oh, and inflicts antimagic on enemies, and makes particularly good use of slaying bonuses.

Guardian spirit and Regen 3 work well for all characters, but particularly melee ones. Luckily, Su is a fairly melee-centric background.

Su is a challenge class?

In skjarl's opinion yes, in most other people's opinion no. Same goes for VS as a species.

I'm playing VSTm, and it goes so nice\great\exellent, that I'm feared, that VS will be nerfed.

I'll give that a try, GlassGo. Sounds interesting. Any advice for would-be transmuters?

As was mentioned in the other Su thread, you want a race with good HP. VS does not fit the bill. I haven't personally tried it, but I see nothing about VS that would make them a good candidate for Su.

That's why I didn't play VS before, I don't like playing species which are not stable.

Nothing special. It's just like any other race, but in addition VS has Regen 3, bite that debilitate enemy magic, spirit shield.
Yes, he can't use potion of heal wounds ot wand with heal wounds - but it doesn't need it actually.
Easiest start I have ever had.

I do not know how it show itself in the late game - he hasn't that much HP, and bloody spells like Hellfire still in game.

VS would be excellent for Su, since VS have quite good magic apts for summoning purposes are very good in melee as well . They would work either as a dedicated summoner that doesn't like touching filthy weapons thank-you-very-much, or as a more reasonable build with good defense and melee that uses summons as a supplement. The very first VSSu I ever played made it to lair in 3.8k turns using a lot of TAB on the first 4-5 levels, and from then on it was basically a dedicated summoner. I had to quit on lair:4 because of a bug in the beast room vault in trunk at the time that made it generate rather a lot of manticores, but lair 1-3 were quite easy.

The no consumable heal is challenging for VS if you make a mistake, but then you have summons available to facilitate escape in addition to all the other escape options. If you're doing a lot of melee as VSSu, you'll have the option to generate an army to take down or soften-up things if you're afraid a low-hp situation could develop from melee alone.

What size is a vine stalker for purposes of shield training? I've been assuming normal/human, but I can't find definite information about it anywhere.

Normal size.

Most forms (spider and ice form do for sure, I guess dragon and statue do too) disable your anti-magic bite which means you can't drain MP to fuel your guardian shield, so play very conservatively until you have blade hands online and think twice about using forms against dangerous enemies.

Starting with 9 HP is tricky, but at least my "autosave on high damage feature" encouraged to use summons instead of taking unnecessary risk (reloading game after getting 4 damage from hobgoblin may look annoying but it makes clear that I should not be meleeing things).
Found only one brand weapon on D1-2 and it turned out anti-magic so it looks like I will play a pure summoner for a while.
VSSu encourages kiting IMHO - while I an running in circles to regenerate my wounds, summoned monsters kill the monster. At least this is what I did after stupidly engaging a poisonous monster in melee.

Vine Stalker secretly has high HP. They can't take lethal damage (except from poison?) without losing all of their mp also, and their bite attack refills a significant amount of mana; also, they a +1 mp aptitude so they gain mana pool fast. On paper a VS might have low health, but when you realize that its actual health is hp + mp and that almost every time you attack you effectively get a potion of magic applied to you, their effective health pool is not small at all.