Yes, that's intended. It's not a very easy concept to convey, but the idea is that she's trying to transform out of the armour because she'll start to take damage over time after a certain point, and if she can't do it in time or gets interrupted too many times she'll still force it which staggers her.
Yeah, the cover art is pretty bad for the purpose of conveying what it's about since I didn't have any other marketing materials prepared other than this pic I use as a profile pic and I didn't really want to use a screenshot either. I had thought about commissioning someone for it for DD60, but I figured it wouldn't be done in time and I wasn't going to try and rush it.