Path of Exile 2 Patch 0.5.5c: Precursors Quest Bug Fixed

Grinding Gear Games shipped patch 0.5.5c for Path of Exile 2 on September 17, a bug-fix update built around one specific blocker: some players couldn't finish the campaign's endgame questline no matter what they tried. The patch lands in the middle of the Forbidden Rites event league and doesn't touch balance or add content, but it clears out a batch of issues that had piled up since 0.5.5 launched two weeks earlier.

01What's in Patch 0.5.5c

Patch 0.5.5c is a maintenance update, posted to the official Path of Exile forums by a Grinding Gear Games staff member. It's the third revision of the 0.5.5 "Forbidden Rites" patch, following 0.5.5 on September 4 and 0.5.5b shortly after. Nothing in this pass changes skills, monster balance or league mechanics; every entry is either a quest-progression fix, a boss or Trial bug, or a stability fix.

02The Legacy of the Precursors Fix

The headline item fixes a rare but serious problem in the Legacy of the Precursors questline: some players who defeated the Arbiter of Divinity couldn't advance the quest afterward, effectively locking them out of that content. Two related pickup requirements were tightened at the same time. Players must now be present when the bosses of the Patriarch Halls and Matriarch Halls die to receive the Origin Spark and Origin Cradle, and the same rule now applies to the Western and Eastern Enigma Chambers for the Ancient Crisis Fragment and Weathered Crisis Fragment. Grinding Gear Games also fixed the case where a player who beat the Arbiter of Ash, but hadn't yet cleared Count Geonor and Doryani in the Enigma Chambers, would get stuck; the quest now correctly lets that player speak to Doryani after ascending the elevator in The Burning Monolith.

One more progression change ships alongside it: reaching Act 4 Islands now requires turning in the Boat Charter to Makoru first, closing a route that let players skip past that step.

03Boss and Endgame Bug Fixes

Several boss encounters got bug fixes rather than tuning changes. Tavakai, the Chieftain, had a blocking issue during his phase 2 transition that could stall the fight entirely; that's now fixed. Rakkar, the Frozen Talon, had a damage immunity exploit patched, and Tor Gul, the Defiler, no longer locks up during a specific action sequence. In the Trial of Chaos, the "Wager of Chaos" modifier was rewarding the wrong tier, handing out a tier 1 reward when the wager called for tier 2; that reward calculation is now correct, and a terrain clipping spot players were using to skip sections of the Trial has been closed.

04Quality-of-Life and Stability Changes

The rest of the list is smaller but adds up. Deferred Items in Ritual encounters could have their costs update multiple times within a single area instead of locking in once, which is now fixed. A visibility bug near Rog's shop in Kingsmarch, where The Hooded One could fail to appear, is resolved, as is a bug where players entering the Ziggurat Refuge endgame town wouldn't wake up in their bed as intended. Runesmithing Knowledge unlocks now correctly persist for characters migrated out of Solo Self-Found or for Hardcore characters who died, rather than resetting. Grinding Gear Games also added a small convenience feature: Balbala in the Trial of the Sekhemas now offers an "Identify Items" option.

On the technical side, the patch fixes a bug where Farrow's shop failed to detect Verisium currency in Expedition Stash Tabs, corrects a chat name output error affecting Asinia and Draven during the Forbidden Rites league, and resolves three separate client crashes and three instance crashes.

05What This Means for Forbidden Rites

Forbidden Rites, the event league built around campaign-wide Ritual encounters, runs until Path of Exile 2 exits early access on December 11, when the game becomes free-to-play alongside its 1.0 launch. Patch 0.5.5c doesn't reset league progress or characters; it applies automatically the next time you launch the game through Steam or the standalone client, no manual download required beyond the normal patch process. Given how targeted this fix is toward a single quest blocker, players who were stuck on Legacy of the Precursors should find the questline completable again without starting over. Expect more of these smaller maintenance patches between now and 1.0 as Grinding Gear Games continues reacting to bug reports from the current Forbidden Rites population rather than waiting for the next major content patch.