my payouts were a solid .03 to .086 per block, now dropped to .006? exactly same hashrate. Colour me confused....
Have you been finding less shares?
Your payout may change based on the amount of shares you find, and the variation of the pools hashrate. If the pool hashrate goes down, the pools [share] difficulty goes down and you will earn a little more due to finding more shares. If the pools hashrate increases, you will earn less. The other side of this is as the pools hashrate increases, more blocks should be found; and as the pools hashrate decreases less blocks would be found.
So your payout may change based on the pools hashrate, if your hashrate stays the same.
Typically when your expected payout drops way down, it's because you're either finding fewer than expected shares (variance) or the shares you are finding are orphaned or DOA. Also, take a look at the node on which you're mining. If the node's hash rate will lead it to finding a lot of shares, the node will adjust the share difficulty up to compensate. You can counteract this by using the "/" parameter in your miner user name:
BTC_ADDRESS/1
This will tell the node that no matter what it determines the share difficulty to be, you want it to accept shares of minimum network difficulty from you.