Well, if you’re not in a country that cares about torrenting or related legal action, torrenting without a VPN provides faster speeds since everything isn’t being encrypted, and port forwarding can allow connections that may not occur without.
My VPN service offers a private SOCKS5 proxy w/ Auth for faster torrenting without encryption, that still masks your IP from other torrenters, but I don’t use it since there’s still a risk of my ISP seeing some traffic with unencrypted headers, and sending notices. I just stick with VPN and slower speeds.