Call of Duty: Black Ops 3’s new specialist feature gives all players a chance to earn a power ability. With the specialist, all players have a power meter in the bottom right of their HUD. Once that fills up, players can use the ability or weapon they chose for their specialist. The power meter fills up based upon time and fills up faster by earning more points/kills.

Dan Bunting (Multiplayer Director), speaking to Mashable, stated that the earn rates for power meter will be different based upon certain game modes, to ensure the abilities are balanced with different modes.

“We have talked about doing different earn rates for these mechanics in different game modes and game types,” Bunting says. “It really brings up this heightened moment of tension when you earn the weapon, because there’s so much feeling of loss when you get killed while you’re using it. You want to hold onto it as long as you can, as long as that meter will let you. So it comes down to a lot of feel; how does that tension feel in certain modes?”

Specifically, Bunting mentioned that in Search and Destroy, the power meter will take a longer time to fill up.

“Search & Destroy, for example, is a much slower, more tactical game mode and we’ve talked about making the earn rate much longer in that mode so you basically build up to the final matches and then, at that point, you start to see people come out with their big, powerful weapons. It makes for some really great spectator entertainment. It’ll all come down to tuning and getting the feel right for each mode.”

Treyarch has revealed six out of the nine specialists thus far.

SOURCE: Mashable