Are you kinda good at drawing your very own sprites and tiles (not converting from SNES/NES/GB/RPG Maker)? If so, in some occasions, people here request graphics for their projects, but not in the pixel art section of the forums. Unfortunately, Omnimaga always lacked in the pixel artist area. Most were on MaxCoderz and the few we had and the many they had kinda vanished over the time. If you love drawing your own graphics from scratch, sometimes, it's good to scout active threads from time to time in case you would like to help.

Back to leveling up, try to not do it like Dying Eyes either. What I mean is for example, at LV 5, you get killed by a gargoyle in one hit and you do 1 damage, then when you reach LV 6, you pwn the shit out of that gargoyle.