I need ARIA advice

I know ARIA is a complex character but I’m having trouble reconciling her designation of ‘balanced’ when her utilities can be taken away.
Jago is another balanced character. He does everything fairly well. Unlike ARIA, he doesn’t have to mess with swapping bodies to do his thing, and his abilities aren’t destroyed one by one.
This makes it look to me like ARIA’s signature abilities are just handicaps because switching can leave you vulnerable.

How does she make up for this?

I ask because I get the most satisfaction from playing the underrated characters and I’d love to get good with ARIA. I’m struggling a bit with her though. Knowing which body I’m using and when to use which body seems like too much info to parse when I’m fighting.

What do you guys do to keep it all straight?

ARIA it’s more mixup-oriented than Jago. Her bodies are among the best of their class when paired with her assist.

You can outzone many characters with bass body, or even with another body combining bass assist + medium kick to destroy incoming proyectiles.

You can set up mixp-us when in booster/blade body scoring a explosive arc ender, calling booster assist, and then jumping over the rival, setting a left/right mix up or a high/low(specially in blade body)

You can see a lot of info about ARIA in @Infilament Killer instinct Guide.
http://ki.infil.net/aria.html

Take a look and if you have any doubt, ask wherever you want!

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ARIA was so complex in the beginning for me, but once I played her for like a day or two straight she became fun and manipulative. And it helps to know her when you have match ups, similar to how I found hisako tech even though I’m only level 34…

Aria isn’t really built around her “balanced” moveset. She’s built around locking an opponent in place so that she can then abuse them with her mixups. With her assists in play, she’s much more mixup oriented than someone like Jago, and unlike him a goodly portion of her mixups aren’t really shadow counterable.

In terms of keeping everything straight, I think I’d say that’s something that just comes with playing her more. Her primary tools are pretty straightforward and are based around her kicks by and large, so there’s a lot of options you have that pretty much stay the same across her bodies. I don’t generally believe in switching bodies just to switch them, but I do swap out enough to keep bodies from dying. The greatest asset she has can be a near dead body and a full instinct bar - I really recommend working to keep your bodies functional. Her swap enders are good for doing this in a non-suicidal manner.

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As has been said, Aria is cheap because she has assists; taking the bodies by themselves would yield a decent character, but not one cheap enough to survive in KI. She starts the match at her strongest, with super cheap mixups available, and gets worse over the course of the match.

Some advice worth reading (more on my guide page linked above):

  1. I think switching with you have ANY white life or under about 50% life on a body is pretty important. Sometimes you won’t be able to, but if you can escape and your opponent doesn’t chase you, I would switch immediately. If you land a hit, I would do a one chance into switch ender. This is because…

  2. Her instinct is super, super valuable when you have all 3 bodies. If you don’t manage to use instinct with all 3 bodies alive, I think you lower your chances of winning the match really drastically. Unfortunately, if you don’t combo break, the instinct baaarely doesn’t come in time before your first body dies, so you NEED to switch to make it work (or combo break a few times).

  3. I would try to save blade body for last, if you can; it’s the only real body that can mount a comeback by itself. The problem is that blade + bass assist is super good, so you kinda want to use that as much as you can too. At some point, though, I think you need to switch and die with bass (fireball) body 2nd. If you managed to use instinct before losing your first body, you will have instinct left with blade body, and I think 3 drones + blade is really, really strong for mixups and covering approaches in footsies. If you’re left with bass + no instinct, I think you’re basically dead.

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Is there a preferred way to use her abilities when her instinct is active? I haven’t figured out how best to use all 3 at once.

I think the things you’ll see in terms of using her bodies’ abilities in instinct are mostly just the movement options - Booster’s hover, Blade’s great walkspeed, and Bass’ insane dash. Booster’s dash attacks tend to be a bit punishable, so they aren’t usually used while in instinct in my experience - there are better ways to apply pressure. Ditto to a certain extent for Bass’ projectiles, as those things (1) have a metric ton of recovery, and (2) are somewhat supplanted by the fanfare drones that Aria gets in instinct. The main body assets aside from movement properties that get used in instinct are the fantastic blade body normals and the various enders, though the damage ender is the one you see used most often in my experience.

She gets versions of a lot of her dirty assist setups in instinct off the fanfare drones. That’s really how she mounts her pressure and offense while in instinct. Blade body is the only one whose specials really get seen a lot in instinct - other than that Aria gets along pretty well with just normal->opener.

In Instinct basically you have to play as you would do with the best of all bodies, but without switching. You also have the best assist, bass, but with auto aim effect.

A) When scoring a knockdown:
1- In the corner, call assist an then mix up between Overhead(forward+HP), low(Cr. Mp), or grab
2- Midscreen, call assist and jump over the enemy, hover over him pressing Up. Left right mix up with light kick or the ambiguous MP, that can cross up

B) If you want to play some keepaway/zoning(against an Instinct On Jago, a chunkless Aganos…), call assist and shoot proyectiles. If your rival starts jumping them, jump and punish with air crescendo, covering a good portion of the sky.

C) Use Blade footsies(walk speed and normals range), and mix it with bass fast dash for throws mix ups.

D) You can choose between heavy crescendo or light allegro, two good anti airs. Crescendo if they are over your head, allegro as a shoryuken.

E) You have all your enders. Use crescendo for mix ups when landing a wall-splat, allegro for damage, bass for battery ender

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Play her vortex and profit. Use the launcher ender and juggle with a Crouching Hk for a hard knock down. Call bass assist. Jump over for a cross up. Redo. If you want to fake the cross up,delay any part after the Juggle and you will do a fake cross up and you will be on the opposite side making it a very hard mix up. The sword assist can also make this a low and high mix up.

I can confirm this, lol.

back to the topic- @Archonate79
seriously, bass without any assists is a challenge. Even though Bass is good from a distance, some characters can deal with this like Shago, Kan Ra and will close the distance (or not). Getting caught in mix-up yourself is very difficult to deal with if only Bass body remains.

In my experience, short combos, counters and staying at mid range usually gets me a long way.
My mindset switches from attacking to counter-attacking. But every Aria player has their own way, I think.

Bass body sucks. It is good as an assisr but as a body? It is the worst.

It’s certainly not the primary combat form you want for most MU’s, but bass has its perks. That dash speed is quite useful for popping into and out of combat range at unexpected timings - people expect you to run when you’re in bass, so you can catch a surprising amount of people sleeping by dashing in and pressuring them instead. I think of it as similar to Fulgore on a full reactor…it’s not all that easy to react to Aria’s bass dash.

Bass might not be my preferred way to fight with Aria, but I’ve actually pulled out quite a few wins with it. Just requires you to change your mindset a bit and be creative.

I would like to oppose your statement that Aria’s instinct gets worse as the match goes on. The thing about her instinct later in the game is it lets you make way more moves safe letting you take chances for damage without having to risk it all on a risky high damage combo. BASS assist + Shotgun Blitz is safe and having more than 1 BASS assist that can also track is so kewl. You can even make grabs safe by throwing out an assist and grabbing so if they tech they get hit and if they dont u get a free grab. Also with three MINI DRONES you can do some pretty feisty unbreakable setups for some super guaranteed SAFE damage emphasis on safe since you only would have one body left at the time. Evolve or Die fellow Aria lovers

I don’t think he said her instinct gets worse… I think it was said in relation to her mixups.

I want to find out how to make ARIA’s Bass assist hang around longer on the screen.

You are right but he did say that her instinct is best when u have all three bodies as well as the fact that by not using your instinct with three bodies you lower your chance of winning which is not wrong in the least but my comment was about how when you use instinct with only one body your comeback potential skyrockets also allowing you to make almost all your moves safe to practically eliminate stupid mistakes like throwing out heavy shotgun blitz without using bass assist which is -8 on block
Evolve or Die fellow Aria lovers

The best moment to use her Instinct it’s when one of her bodies it’s about to die.

Damage it’s split between the bodies, so if, for example, you get damage enough to “kill” one body, the other two will recieve less damage. That’s amazing and makes combos against her less damaging

Sadly there is no way to make it stay out longer but there is a few things you can do to make it better.

  1. Fire Ball Wars:
    She is arguably one of the best characters when it comes to fire ball wars since her projectiles (Bass assist or body) goes through regular projectiles such as endodouken. So she really cant be beat unless they use shadow moves but if they choose to challenge you can manual cancel Bass assist into medium kick(7 Frames) which is a projectile so when u throw out the assist and cancel it you shoot down theirs as well as letting yours go through. Win Win scenario for your girl Aria LOL.

  2. Pressuring your opponent:
    (Shotgun Blitz = SB)
    When you use Bass assist to pressure you can get a lot more than you think such as Bass assist+H SB which is completely safe if they block as well as giving you the added benefit of generating a S**T ton of shadow meter if u do it right like continuing with M kick+SB Keep in mind that L SB is -1, M SB is -4 and H SB is -8 so use them wisely ( Side note they go over lows so if they try to sweep or do any other low u crush them). She has way more pressure options such as medium allegro which is +1 on block and safe grab attempts which u do by using assist before grabbing.