Forgot to post my solution early, but its similar to yours so i'll add it here.

use Data::Dumper;
my $test = "xx556xxyyy";
my @matches ;
push @matches, $1 while ($test =~ /((.)\2*)/g);
print Dumper(@matches);
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These solutions have the added benefit of being able to switch to just a list of chars by changeins $1 to $2. Not sure thats of any use but hey. lol. I'm mildly suprised there is no regex command to match last char, or a way to specify which groups to return and with are just used internal to the regex, I guess the need doesn't arise that often.