Aha, I think I can see how that would be confusing. My interpretation was that it had a small chance of making a bad event worse - but I assumed a regular hit would usually be lethal anyway, and you cant kill some one more dead, so whatever probability of deflection they got out of it was pretty 'free'. I think he was going into extra detail on how the weapon performed to dispel rumours, and perhaps inadvertently created one (now some people are convinced this armor is somehow out there to line a fat cats pocket!
Probably from this paragraph. It confused me as well. Throughout the whole article he’s building a case for how bad the armour is, if not worse than no slat armour, then concludes the article with “well broadly, it’s probably still better”.