Coming soon: Quake Combat+, a refinement of Quake, SMC v5.3, and Quake 1.5 aiming to provide the ultimate Quake combat experience without straying too far from the original design to retain compatibility with the hundreds of great custom-made user maps.
Most improvements to weapons in this mod are quite minor & conservative, but the lightning gun is definitely an exception:
-Vastly diversified death animations.
-Double the attack range, but slightly reduced damage on any dealt past the vanilla range (increased range is singleplayer only).
-Improved various effects.
-Reduced cell consumption rate, increased ammo capacity and also more ammo found per pickup.
Vanilla you hardly get to use this awesome gun, and that was a real shame. It chewed through ammo in seconds and additional ammo was hard to come by. This addresses that, yet it still remains the least-used gun in the game.
Powerful? yes. Neccessary? definitely. You will need it, as you've not fought a terrifying quake horde like this before. For every buff the player gets, the enemies get twice as many.