All of the Level 2 talents have the same flaw compared their Level 0 version - at Standard difficulty, the XP only saves a few resources on a card that your probably are using because you have a lot of resources. If this card were Level 1 and otherwise printed as is, I’d consider it more often. I wish the Level 2 talents had the Fast keyword to remove the action cost.

That said, Hard Knocks is the one of the few Level 2 talent cards that isn’t made obsolete by the Dunwich permanents. As fun as Streetwise is, you can run out of resources or only have one left. That happens to me often in Jenny, so having a zero cost talent that allows you to pump Agility and Combat at +1/resource can be okay. It obviously won’t help you with investigating, like Streetwise.

Parallel "Skids" O'Toole is another investigator that can use this to buff fight tests when critical and you can keep the Level 0 version in your deck if you want.

There are a lot of good XP cards that Rogues can spend XP on. This card just seems like a luxury card - if you’re already kicking the scenario’s butt, it might be nice to have.