In the Chaos Space Marines index, the ability the Lost and the Damned allows you to include KHORNE BERZERKERS, RUBRIC MARINES, and PLAGUE MARINES in your army if your army Faction is HERETIC ASTARTES, as long as they do not collectively constitute more than 25% of the total points value of your army.
In the World Eaters, Thousand Sons, and Death Guard indices respectively, each of these units has the BATTLELINE keyword. There is not instruction in the Lost and the Damned ability to remove this keyword when including these units in a HERETIC ASTARTES army.
However, within the Chaos Space Marines index, the equivalent unit for SLAANESH, Noise Marines, do not have the BATTLELINE unit, unless Lucius the Eternal is both included in your army, and selected as your WARLORD.
It seems as though, as the rules are currently written, Noise Marines are actually harder to include in your army than Khorne Berzerkers, Rubric Marines, and Plague Marines, even though Noise Marines are the only unit in your army actually drawn from your own index.
Obviously, this is incongruent, and the current position of Noise Marines is a bit of a stop-gap until the inevitable release of an Emperor's Children codex.
I'm just wondering how people would play it in regards to this rule? It seems strange to play it RAW, but I'm unsure whether it makes more sense to simply grant NOISE MARINES the BATTLELINE keyword, rendering Lucius the Eternal's special WARLORD ability obsolete, or to remove the BATTLELINE keyword from the other units when including them in a HERETIC ASTARTES army, in-line with their historic battlefield role as Elites.
Am I correct about the current RAW, and how would you play it? Would you stick to the RAW, and if not, which of the two options would you adopt?
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