Dislocation clusters in multicrystalline silicon limit solar cell performance by decreasing minoritycarrier diffusion length. Studies have shown that the recombination strength of dislocation clusterscan vary by up to two orders of magnitude, even within the same wafer. In this contribution, wecombine a surface-analysis approach with bulk characterization techniques to explore theunderlying root cause of variations in recombination strength among different clusters. We observethat dislocation clusters with higher recombination strength consist of dislocations with a largervariation of line vector, correlated with a higher degree of variation in dislocation etch-pit shapes(ellipticities). Conversely, dislocation clusters exhibiting the lowest recombination strength containmostly dislocations with identical line vectors, resulting in very similar etch-pit shapes. Thedisorder of dislocation line vector in high-recombination clusters appears to be correlated withimpurity decoration, possibly the cause of the enhanced recombination activity. Based on ourobservations, we conclude that the relative recombination activity of different dislocation clustersin the device may be predicted via an optical inspection of the distribution and shape variation ofdislocation etch pits in the as-grown wafer.