Hahah, as usual the mistake is a silly one.

No exception was being thrown because I was checking if $this->mysqli was an object, which it was, error or not. Using mysqli_connect_error() (or as Salathe did, mysqli_connect_errno()) got it to work.

As a sidenote, mysqli_report() doesn't suppress the PHP notice itself, it just means mysqli_connect_error() doesn't get any information to return to you. So I either have to use @ or error_reporting(0) to test my exception.

Oh and apparently the code wasn't *exactly* as posted, but I won't go into further detail now that it's fixed. Lets just chock it up to early morning coding should not happen in my house. Thank you for your time, I'm here all week.
-m