Promoting Hot standby after running select pg_xlog_replay_pause();

I have a scenario where we are doing an application release and they want to be able to potentially rollback to HA if things go bad. So the current process would be:

1. Run select pg_xlog_replay_pause(); on standby to pause replication
2. Apply changes
3. If team needs to revert to older version of cluster we would run pg_ctl promote

My question is, would pg_ctl prmote start up from the point where replication was paused or would it try and sync before it opens? Thus applying all the changes I am trying to prevent?

Thanks,

Brian