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Hey guys, as the title says, how do you effectively loadout your noise marines?
I've heard that squads of 6 are the best, and that doom sirens are awesome.
One thing I'm not sure about is blast masters, they seem good if you don't move, but they're 30 points. Are they worth it?
The two other things I've been unsure about are whether squads need rhinos or not, and if the icon of excess is worth the points. Your opinions?

I was also wondering how you guys like to loadout your slaanesh demon princes.
I was thinking of something like:

Demon Prince of Slaanesh
- Power Armour
- Wings
- Black Mace

What do you guys think?

Thanks, Pheonix Lord Asurmen

Well 5 dudes with a blastmaster in a rhino are awesome because they can sit back and camp home court with a great HW that more importantly ignores cover. Turns a chaos rhino with a havoc launcher into a high yield razorback of sorts.

Other wise away teams should be 5-10 guys in a rhino with a doom siren and lightning claw for drive bys, all CC weapons here.

A good dual rolled unit is a large unit, say 12-15 with sonics and a banner of ecstasy for camping the middle of the board and dumping dice on things while remaining resilient. This unit is expensive though an I find works best with huron to infiltrate them so they don't lose any precious time firing at full yield.

So five guy teams are great for backfield, but what's a good setup for midfield firepower, because that's more like what I want to use them for.

 Pheonix Lord Asurmen wrote:
So five guy teams are great for backfield, but what's a good setup for midfield firepower, because that's more like what I want to use them for.

The larger unit with sonic weapons and the icon on foot.

A good midfield unit would be a large block of noise marines with banner and sonic weapons, with a slaanesh sorcerer attached. Try for the +1 str sonic power and endurance in biomancy. Keeps your banner from being sniped and losing fnp, and more importantly gives you relentless salvo str 5 blasters.
Doom siren/meltabombs/power weapon on champ, combi-flamer and force axe on sorc, lets them threaten the board and take attackers without much worry.

I've been fielding noise marines for a bit now. They're quite nice. In my mind, NM can fill two exclusive roles, and you want to tailor your unit to match that role.

The first one is back-field fire support. Blastmasters are amazing, especially if you face marines. Cover-hugging marines are the bestest of all. Five NM with a blastmaster is quite cheap, and brings a really nice gun to the battle. These guys can hold an objective in your own side, and contribute meaningfully to a fight going on elsewhere, with their huge range. In this role, you don't want any real upgrades other than the blastmaster -- you want to keep the unit as cheap as possible, because you're hoping they never actually get into combat. I've slaughtered cover-hugging Dark Angels with these guys, and out-shot a Tau Army (Old Codex). Battlesuits getting ID'd by Blastmaster hits, and pathfinders blown up by the handful is quite fun.

The other role for NM is forward attackers. Here there's a bit more options -- rhino or no, sonic blasters or CC/BP, Icon or no. Take Rhinos if you plan on going mech, don't just take a single one. If you take Rhinos, that leads you more towards the sonic blasters/regular bolters, as you can't charge out of them. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not sold on sonic blasters, but I know other people like them. They just make the unit a bit too static at a range that is too short for my liking. If you can put a biomancy sorcerer with them that has endurance, that makes them much more mobile, but that's a luck of the psychic powers draw. Optimizing them for CC is not bad at all, Fearless removes a lot of the problems that Chaos have with CC, and with I5 and FnP they can usually survive a weak counterblow. If you're going anywhere close to the enemy, Doom Sirens are a must-have. They're more of that delicious AP3 flamer stuff. The Icon becomes more worth it the more dudes you have in a squad. In a unit of ten in a Rhino, it's debatable. In a unit of 15-20, it's good. Do not take blastmasters for an upfield squad -- their worth comes from their heavy weapon profile, not their assault profile. They're not worth it on a unit that has to move.

Ideally, you probably want to take some of both of these kinds of squads. Taking all MSU Blastmaster squads is a recipe for getting overwhelmed with enemies -- small blasts still don't kill that many, and aren't that effective if the models destroyed are ork boys, or the opponent knows how to spread his models out.

tl;dr Blastmasters are great in MSU, take Rhinos if you're going mech, the FnP Icon is good if the unit is big.