thatoneguyfromwork - Did you get a hero badge? A level 1001 hero is several orders of magnitude more powerful than a level 1000 hero is, so breaking the level cap by getting a hero badge will allow your progress to jump massively forward.

As for your DPS changing, what probably happened is that you looked at your DPS against a boss the first time and against a regular enemy the second time. As many heroes have Boss Damage + abilities, their DPS will rise when you're up against a boss and then go back down afterward.

If you have to burn your cooldowns just to advance, then don't bother - just burn your cooldowns for those last few levels, and then reborn.

And yeah, the double moe crystals event was less noticeable than previous ones, and I didn't even realize it was running. If I'd known, I would have reborned yesterday. 90000 moe crystals cut down to 45000 because of that! That's going to be a lot less of an incentive to go all the way to level 2000+ before reborning.