Another thing which seems to be the case with this card: multiple copies can be placed on a single location.

This is interesting and different from many other location attachments, potentially providing for a strong sudden draw, should you find a couple of copies in your hand and some spare Spirit resources!

So unless I am missing something this hero allows you to play a eagle ally from your hand at no cost every quest phase and choose between doing some direct damage or boosting quest power?

It doesn't look like this action even exhausts the hero. How is this card not broken lol. OP

You still have to pay the normal cost for the Eagle ally -- Faunith's ability merely lets you play that ally outside the planning phase with a little extra bonus. Same as, for example, Thranduil. —
"Play" implies having to pay the resource cost and respecting the resource match (unless clearly said otherwise like with Thranduil that allows you to play the Silvan ally without resource match). It's "put into play" which bypasses resource cost and resource match. —

This card seems to suffer from a design flaw. Its basic effect—paying 1 resource and discarding a card to draw just one—results in a net loss, making it inefficient and rarely worth including. It lacks meaningful impact or synergy, which limits its usefulness and suggests it may not have been fully balanced during development.

While it could find a niche in strategies that rely on triggering draw effects or thinning the deck, its overall value remains questionable.

A possible fix for this card could be:

Event. Cost (0) Action: Discard X cards from your hand. Look at the top X cards of any player's deck. Add 1 of those cards to its owner's hand, and return the rest to the top of the deck in any order.

This way, its effect could be better utilized by discarding cards that aren’t needed in hand, enabling synergies in mining-style decks or those focused on discard pile interaction.

1

This card is so satisfying to pull off. But then, if I like it so much, why don't I put it in more decks? I was thinking about that recently, and I think I figured out why: the most common point of this card is to prevent an enemy from attacking you (by attacking and destroying it first); but the thing is, Feint accomplishes exactly the same thing but better. With Feint, you don't have to be able to kill the enemy right away in order to stop its attack, and then you can gang up with as many allies as you want to attack it. Plus you can use Feint to help another player, which you can't with Quick Strike unless you have a Ranged character. I think the only advantages Quick Strike has over Feint are 1) being able to trigger your "when this character attacks/defeats an enemy" abilities whenever you want, and 2) being able to attack quest-related enemies early to advance the quest before the combat phase. But from my experience these two situations are few and far between enough that I've always been happy to draw Feint in almost every case, while so many things have had to go right in order for Quick Strike to be useful for me when I draw it.

The true power of this card IMHO lies in how, due to an old ruling, this can allow you to attack enemies that are immune to player card effects, basically allowing you to Feint such an enemy (providing you have enough attacking power) which is something you cannot normally do. Another niche of this card is that with someone like Dunhere you can snipe an enemy in the staging area before quest resolution or engagement. —
Also, don't forget that Quick Strike allows you to attack the same enemy a second time with the same character! If you have a way of readying your high attack character, this allows you to deal twice the normal damage. Of course the second attack will come after the enemy attacks you first. —
Also worth noting how this, like many Core Set cards, was probably also meant as a sort of "silver bullet" against certain enemies, like Wargs or Hummerhorns (if used in combination when Dunhere) —