Struggling in Hero mech

[adese]

the hammer time guy beat on me pretty good, but i never moved away from him. we killed him anyways. for future reference, when do i get away from him? i think i saw him doing 2 different emotes. do i move out when it says he raises his fist?

You should get a message in the middle of your screen that says something similar to "so and so raises his hammer". He'll then start to swing his hammer up and down a lot, doing a ton of damage to anyone in melee. You want to get out of melee range as soon as you can at that point.